After 21 years as De Anza College’s health educator, Mary-Jo Lomax retired following the fall 2011 quarter.

“I think there is more that I’m going to miss than I realize quite yet,” she said.

Lomax said she enjoyed interacting with students and the feeling of community, “knowing that when I walk on campus I feel so comfortable there … people know me, I know people.”

Over the years, Lomax has witnessed the expansion of both De Anza’s campus and the services provided by the health center. When Lomax first arrived in 1990, her only co-workers were a nurse and a day and night shift receptionist.

“We had a little ‘family planning clinic’ we called it, where we hired a doctor to do gynecological exams,” Lomax said. ” And that was just once a week, and we were in a tiny little space and the exams took place in another room on campus.”

Today the health center has an additional nurse, nurse practitioner and a part-time physician and nurses. It also offers services that were not available when Lomax began such as smoking cessation counseling and immunizations. And gynecological exams are now available by appointment four days a week at the health center.

Over the years, Lomax has noticed a subtle shift in attitudes towards condoms. In her first years at De Anza, Lomax said condoms still had an air of novelty to them. When the health center would hand out packages of condoms during National Condom Week in February, “by Tuesday afternoon they would all be gone. People just loved getting them.”

Lomax thinks that even students who weren’t sexually active would take the packages. But starting around 10 years ago, students increasingly declined to take condoms and were more willing to say that they weren’t sexually active.

“I don’t know if the population changed or there was more of a comfort level to say that ‘I don’t have to pretend that I’m having sex’ … or whether if it was that condoms were more of household name now,” Lomax said.

She’s particularly proud of starting the smoking cessation program. Initially a seven-week group program, Lomax noticed it was ineffective for many students and tweaked the format to the present one-on-one sessions.

One of the perks of working at De Anza was the convenience of taking classes. Lomax took advantage, taking courses before or after work or using her lunch break. She looks forward to having a more open schedule should take classes again.

While Lomax doesn’t have any particular plan for her retirement, she said she won’t be watching TV.

“I am excited about having time to do things that I already like to do,” she said, “like running, biking, and gardening, and also to explore new activities.”